A brief guide to the life of me.
New Year's Eve/Day
Until we got older, staying up late meaning staying up closer to ten. We'd set off crackers, drink sparkling cider, and party. This was before the days before firework manners went off the radar, when people actually stopped setting them off at a reasonable hour. Later, usually Kelly would be at a party, and Emily and I would be home with our parents eating chocolate fondue. Um. Happy New Year?
The following day, we'd measure ourselves on a pole in our basement. Talk about starting the new year off feeling inadequateâKelly was already towering pretty far over me, and Emily was getting there too. Then we'd head off to eat our Christmas gingerbread house, the best part of all. New Year's Day became happy again.
Valentine's Day
The best part was doing the card exchange at school and seeing what goodies you got. Whether it was candy hearts, Dove chocolates, or the standard candy pops that came with the valentines, it was always super fun to go through them. Then you'd go through them again on the bus ride home and gorge yourself on candy.
The only issue was when a fifth-grade classmate collected my Harry Potter valentines from classmates. I was conflicted. Should I be sad or angry that other classmates were so willing to give them up? Or should I be excited that she loved it so much that she wanted more?
The one moment I can remember most about those parties, though, was a classmate interacting with a banner ad on the computer in third grade. It was one of those "hit the duck and win a big prize!!" type things. When Max hit the duck, everyone was thrilled. Echoes of "Max hit the duck!" were heard for a while. Whatever spammy "prize" he got, I'm not sure he really won. But I was fine with my candy jackpot, personally.
Valentine's Day chocolate is good no matter how old you are...or how old it is. Sometime in college, I was cleaning out my closet when I found an old homework journal from February of first grade. There was a chocolate ladybug taped to the inside of it from Mrs. Compson. So I did whatever anyone in that situation would do: I ate it. It was a little musty, but it was clearly chocolate. Besides, it was in a shiny foil wrapper. Nothing wrapped in shiny foil tastes bad.
St. Patrick's Day
We did what everyone else did. We wore green.
We're also kind of Irish. 1/36th or something. Grandpa, who likes family history, always thought it was important, or at least interesting. The Irish history lessons appeared when I played games of Sorry with them, too. If it was March, he'd try to play Irish music (not for long, since Grandma and I could only take so much). He'd also employ the luck of an invisible leprechaun to help him win games. It didn't work well. Grandma said he must have drunken his way into a corner.
The only time St. Patrick's Day was interesting to me was when we built the leprechaun traps. Our first grade class learned how to write letters, and one assignment was to write to a leprechaun to entice him to visit traps that we built. We built a fun one at home. Luring him with gold, he would walk into the trap and a box would fall on him. Kelly, sensing excitement, wanted to build one too. Unfortunately, it became obvious that the leprechaun's handwriting looked a lot like our teacher's.
Years later, Emily randomly decided that she believed in leprechauns and wanted to leave out a trap of her own. She came home from school to green confetti, a goody bag of green gifts, and toilet water dyed green. Moms can be creative when they want to be.
Oh, and you can't forget about the Shamrock Shakes. True story: Shamrock Shakes are overrated. It's like drinking mint chocolate chip ice cream, and you have the sensation of being filled up. So you end up with two or three sips with most of the shake left behind. St. Patty's chocolate shakes, anyone?
Easter
Easter Eve was almost bigger than Easter itselfâsimilar to Christmas.
Egg dyeing always happened on Easter Eve. Bring out the floral yellow tablecloth, the vinegar, and the Paas kits with stickers that nobody ever used! We took our egg decorating very seriously, sometimes spending up to 2 hours on them. Inside jokes from the previous year and pretty designs abounded. Then, it was time to watch The Ten Commandments. Sort of. The movie was so long that it took years for anyone to even see the ending.
In the morning, the Easter Bunny would arrive! The anticipation of the morning was made more stressful by whether the bunny would remember to bring our favorite chocolate bunny, Parsnip Pete---the Christmas equivalent to worrying about coal in your stocking. We loved Parsnip Pete so much that Mom had to drive to the next state to find it once.
Then we'd dress up and go to church, where our Sunday School teacher would present a lesson with tokens representing the Easter story. I almost always wound up with the empty egg, symbolizing the fact that He Was Risen!
After church, it would be time for brunch, where we had great food and TEA CAKES for dessert. You couldn't beat little tea cakes. Still can't. Then, Grandma and Grandpa would come back to the house with us and watch us hunt for eggs. This hunt used to be at their Peppercorn Bend house, with the cherry trees in full bloom. Eventually, egg hunts moved to home as we got older, and the grandparents stopped coming altogether. But these hunts posed a new problem: my sister the money-grubber.
One year, my dad had the brilliant idea of putting dollar bills into some of the eggs. (Grandma and Grandpa used to put quarters in long ago). He was foolishly hoping that we'd all find the same amount of eggs with money. But that's not how life works. Sitting on the deck, opening our eggs, Emily would crack them open and go, "Another dollar!" "Another dollar!" "Another dollar!" ad infinitum. I think I wound up with three dollars that year.
While past years weren't as extreme, in my experience she always wound up with the most cash. Oh, and we had to share our candy, too, because she got so little of it in the hunt. Yay? The candy was what most of us wanted anyway.
Memorial Day
Not much of a holiday, but I could be found usually doing one of a few things depending on the time of life:
a. Walking in the local parade with the Adventure Princesses.
b. Watching the paradeâthis came later.
c. Preparing a send-off show for the seniors in high school over the holiday weekend. This was a torturous process in rehearsal, but super fun when it was show time.
Also, usually, golf was on at home for some reason. Truly, it symbolized the beginning of summer.
Summer
Two words: vacation and camp. See "The Summer Camp Rebellion of 2011" for more on camps.
We always started by going to the Jersey shore for a week in the summer. That was nice, and wouldn't have had it any other way at the time. However, there wasn't a lot to do other than go to the beach and the arcade and the boardwalk. Eventually, we began going to Cape Cod.
It disappointed me at first. The beaches were more "nature-y" with their bayside dunes and waves (no more huge waves, arcades, or planes carrying signs behind them), but we soon found that the bay water was easier to swim and boogie board in. Soon, it became like a second home. We even named a future dog after one of the small towns: Brewster.
While we weren't on vacation or at camp, we'd usually be going to the pool.
Except our pool wasn't actually that great. The first public pool I went to was at the Valley Park. It took twenty minutes to get there, or maybe it was just the change in terrain that made me feel that way---we would be out of suburbia and into the woods near the river that led to the next state. Once you actually got there, you had to hike past the parking lot, down the path, hike up some steps, walk past the playground, hike up more steps, go down a rocky trail, hike up even more steps, make a left turn at Albuquerque, and proceed through the restrooms.
Yes. Through the restrooms. To get to the pool you would enter a concrete building, walk through it until you reached a staircase, and you'd climb a staircase at the end. Once you climbed the steps you would finally arrive at the pool. There was nothing like the anticipation of finally getting to enter the water on a hot day. At Valley Park, you certainly got that buildup.
The pool itself was divided into thirds with buoys. Two sections, at opposite ends, were three feet deep. The "deep end" was more like the "deep middle", and flotation devices weren't allowed. That effectively stopped us from entering it since we still used water wings. Swimming is much less fun when you're confined to a small corner of the pool.
And afterwards, what do you do for a snack? Forget about a snack bar---there wasn't one. There was a shaded pavilion, and families could bring coolers, but there wasn't so much as a vending machine. Nothing completes the pool experience like sitting on the pavement on your beach towel, poolside, snacking on a squashed baggie of Cheez-Its from the pantry while trying to avoid the wasps that won't stick to the thickly settled grass.
Eventually we did join a better pool at a country club. But after a year or two, we ended up changing to a cute little place that had a diving pool, a kiddie pool, an actual snack bar (with ice cream bars!!) and beach chairs, and, best of all, an old couple who owned the place. A sweet older lady was always waiting to scan our badges upon arrival. Now THIS was the pool experience....and then, several years later, they tore it all down to make way for apartments. End of regular summer pool time.
I should also mention Rita's. No Philly-area summers complete without it. Our Rita's was a white stucco hut on an island in the middle of the parking lot of a shopping center. There was also a grassy area in the back with hills (we called them the Teletubby hills) and some picnic tables. It was a great place to play as long as you stayed away from the parking lot. But in 2021, they too paved paradise and put up yet another bank, so no more Teletubby hills for the next generation.
Halloween
How many of you knew That Kid who always had to be accompanied by parents when trick-or-treating?
Guess who that was.
I loved the American Girl books. One of these books, Meet Molly, featured the main characters trick-or-treating and running into a classmate, Allison. She was trick-or-treating with her mom in one scene, and the narrator said something like, "You had to feel sorry for Allison." Welp. Even in third grade, I overheard two classmates talk about how their mom invited herself along and how they ran away.
I tried to compensate for this by thinking of it as "family bonding time." Well...at least we got candy. And individually wrapped peanut butter cups. Nobody can tell me that those aren't the best peanut butter cups. Eventually, Dad no longer walked up to the houses with us anyway.
One year in our Oak Road house (I don't remember too much about Dunst Drive trick-or-treating, except that Katie's house gave out super fun goody bags and that the neighborhood has 150 houses. We must have hit the jackpot), my dad finally announced that we could go to seven houses by ourselves, Kelly and I. This was a joke, considering that I was in middle school and my classmates had been going by themselves for ages. Besides, our neighborhood wasn't dangerous. Even Christine went with her friend Gabby, though her dad followed a ways behind them.
We encountered some memorable houses. One strict lady gave out pencils. Another house was famous for popcorn balls. Sheepdog Guy's wife had a wishing witch where we'd make wishes. And Mrs. Miller always had us tell a joke for candy. She liked me, and often offered me a second candy bar instead of the usual one, incensing my sister and her friend one year. And the smell of our plastic pumpkins filled with candy was second only to the sweet smell of our Easter baskets permanently embedded with the scent of Palmer bunnies past.
But there were other great parts to Halloween, too. Like watching the Great Pumpkin with slice-and-bake cookies. And wearing your costume to school. (I was also That Kid who tended to wear their costume all day at schoolâbe it Cinderella, a poodle skirt girl, or hula dancer.) Through fifth grade, we paraded the halls of the local retirement community in our costumes, wishing everyone a happy Halloween.
Thanksgiving
I hated nothing like Thanksgiving when I was young. Ever. It was just so...boring! All you did was eat with relatives you didn't really know.
Picture this: adults gathered around the table catching up on life. Somebody was selling the house. Someone else was dealing with a distant Uncle Mike, who was supposed to be living in a trailer park and had disappeared somewhere. Yawn.
My family was pretty smallâother than my grandpa's West Virginia relatives, who we rarely saw or heard from. It would usually be us, my grandparents, my grandma's sister and her husband, and we saw my dad's cousin's family a few times. Their house was more funâhis wife was a great cardmaker, and we enjoyed looking through her stash. (Many years later, I would take to making cards myself.)
There was a kids' table one year, and that was a little more interesting. There weren't a ton of kids, though, since we were small. Just me, Kelly, and the two male second cousins who existed so far. Otherwise, there was nothing to look forward to other than 2-hour drives and discussion. Hopefully, you liked turkey and stuffing, or there wasn't much to look forward to then, either.
Eventually, it became just us and the grandparents as my aunt Donna and uncle Jim got older. (The West Virginia relatives and my dad's cousin's family never cameâthey were either too busy, too far, too old, or too dead.) We would eat at their house, but that too would become tediousâGrandma loved to clean as she went, resulting in LOTS of time in the kitchen preparing for a twenty-minute meal. So we started going to feast at the country club, but we'd also go back to their house to celebrate the birthdays of Kelly and my mom afterward, which fell at the end of November. Nobody had to cook and dinner was fun again.
My Quaker school was right. Simplicity was truly a spice of life.
Christmas
The pinnacle of childhood. Heck, the pinnacle of adulthood. I'm sorry. I'll never be a hater. Christmas rules.
These days, I prepare for Christmas by designing Elf on the Shelf letters for my party blog. (Shameless plug: get your letters today at partypatchblog.blogspot.com! And you can get some personalized, too. All for the low price of zero dollars and no cents! Except, maybe not today if it's not November or December. I'm not open then.) And doing everything else I used to love! We've always loved driving around to see Christmas lights in and around the Dunst Drive neighborhood, but recently we've realized that it's even more fun to dine in at Burger King beforehand. We wear crowns and everything before heading on our merry way.
There's the one house that always has Rudolph characters, and there are usually plenty of inflatables. And then there are the few that go all out; the grand finales. One house in town plays Christmas movies on a screen. Another one is a Christmas Light Fight wannabe which actually slows down the traffic in a neighborhood that doesn't see much traffic.
The specials are always amazing. If you come across Christmas Vacation when it's on, you have to put it on so you can soak it up before entering the Regular Year when Christmas is over. And it's totally okay to enjoy Rudolph and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, though I gave up on them for a few years in middle school because Christine said they weren't cool anymore.
But I'm so glad I returned to them. These tacky specials are good for quotable moments, which eventually turn into inside jokes.
TOP LINES FROM CHRISTMAS SPECIALS WE QUOTE ALL YEAR
6. "I've been disenchanted." -Winter Warlock, Santa Claus is Coming to Town
5. "We'll be independent together." -Hermey, Rudolph
4. "I'm not such a loser after all!" -Winter Warlock, Santa Claus is Coming to Town
3. "I've been bamboozled!" -Burgermeister, Santa Claus is Coming to Town
2. "Such is the life of an elf." -Sam the Snowman, Rudolph
And, most importantly...
1. "Oh fudge. *But I/he/she didn't say fudge.*" -Ralphie, A Christmas Story
But it was the gingerbread houses that took a hiatus for a few years. When we were still living on Dunst Drive and living with my dog Brittany, we had worked very hard on a house (though Kelly just took the bowl of M&Ms to the living room). We soon found that chocolates would be disappearing, but not all at once. Day after day, a peppermint patty would be gone, then a candy cane. An M&M. A We thought Dad was up to no good. The evidence was obvious, right? Neither of us kids could reach the counter.
One day, Mom walked in to discover Brittany sneaking a gumdrop. That was that. Dog: 10. People: 0. If dogs ever take over the world, we need to be scared, because they are smart.  And her self-control was unmatched. Give me a gingerbread house any day and see if I can manage to eat only one piece at a time.
Christmas Eve was a holiday in itself. We'd go to church when I was younger, then go home to read Twas the Night Before Christmas and throw reindeer food onto the lawn. I remember one night on Dusnt Drive, sitting around the kitchen table with my grandparents after church.
"I wonder where Santa is. I bet he's getting close..." Grandma said.
"Maybe he's up the chimney right now!" Grandpa said. He leaned towards the living room to get a better look at the fireplace.
I absolutely panicked. After all, Santa would never come if we weren't in bed! I tried to go to bed as quickly as possible, but being out of bed didn't seem to stop Santa. Piles of presents were there the following morning anyway.
Christmas morning was always great. First, we gave our dog (or dogs) their Christmas bones and hope that nobody would get possessive and end up in Christmas time-out. Brittany always got a huge, candy cane-shaped rawhide bone. The later puppies got little bones. Our Cavalier King Charles, Cooper, always seemed to end up in prison on the 25th for getting overly territorial of his bone and everyone else's. Mom would make coffee, then we'd hit the stockings.
Then it was present time, and we'd have cinnamon rolls for breakfast. After fun times playing with our gifts, it would be time to head to the grandparents' for more fun and gifts, and tons of food. It was always just the best day.
I always loved to see a second tree as well. My favorite ornament of theirs was the vintage 101 Dalmatians ball, maybe because we had the same one. But they also had bubble lights that we loved. Some years, the bubble lights adorned the tree. Other years, they didn't. We never knew the logic behind that decision.
But it's important to remember that our only recently-discovered Thanksgiving hack also helps for Christmas: DON'T FREAKING BOTHER COOKING. Especially if you have a grandma who loves to clean as she goes. If you do cook, after opening gifts, Christmas will be spent waiting for your grandma to cook and clean the kitchen while they put you in front of Shrek to pass the time. (How I spent a long-awaited Christmas Day at eighteen. Yay? Like, there is a time and place for Shrek, but it sure as heck isn't Christmas.) We only learned this several years agoâskip out on dinner and simply have an appetizer/snack smorgasbord instead.
Simplicity, family, and no feast. You can't go wrong.